The Nick Bare Podcast - Archive - Jeff Cunningham | The 5 Pillars of Distance Training

Episode Date: March 7, 2022

Does running slower make you faster?   On this week’s episode, Nick’s marathon coach Jeff Cunningham is back for his second time on the podcast to discuss the most effective way to train for distance running.     Nick and Jeff share specific insight into how workouts are being crafted and executed to move towards Nick’s goal of running under 2:50 at the Buffalo Marathon at the end of May.  They dive deep into how to properly apply the “5 Pillars of Distance Running,” which are easy runs, speed workouts, recovery, nutrition, and strategic planning, to your training.  If you are looking to PR your next distance race, you will want to tune in to this episode.   Watch Episode 3 of Nick’s Marathon Prep series on the 5 Pillars: https://youtu.be/ysUMSRaldpY   More Resources: BPN website: www.bpnsupps.com Nick’s website: www.nickbare.com Nick’s Instagram: www.instagram.com/nickbarefitness Nick’s Youtube: www.youtube.com/user/barelifenutrition   Follow Us On Social Media! Instagram: @thebareperformancepodcast Facebook: The Bare Performance Podcast Twitter: @BarePerformPod

In this episode of the Bear Performance Podcast, be audacious, but be audacious right up to that line before it gets unrealistic. And that's where I like to coach you. Let's be audacious. Let's dream big, but let's be strategic in our planning so that we can go and have an amazing day. Let's accomplish our goals. But let's be super methodical in our strategic planning in all things. audacious up to the line of unrealistic. That's where I want the goals to be.

That's powerful. Because if you aren't trying to be audacious, you're going to wake up in 10 years and you're going to wonder if. Welcome back to another powerful episode of the podcast. I'm your host, Nick Baer, founder and CEO of Bear Performance Nutrition. Every week, we bring you insightful stories, knowledge, and inspiration to help you reach your full potential in life, fitness, and business. If you enjoy the message we're promoting in this podcast, we would greatly appreciate it

if you would leave a rating and review on the platform you're listening to. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss out on future episodes that embody the go one more mindset. We have Marathon Coach Jeff Cunningham back on the podcast. Welcome back. Thank you. Glad to be back. This time, we are deep into Marathon Prep together, going for the sub-250 Marathon. Marathon, Buffalo, New York, May 29th, 2022.

Can't wait. Dude, I'm psyched to be back into training. Man, there are so many people who are doing really well with the training, and it's the anticipation of the training. I think that gets us fired up, and then when we get in it and it's going well, I think it just sort of starts rolling, and it, it's invigorating, it's exciting, it's intoxicating, I love it. coming off of an ultra prep

this is why I was really excited to get back into a marathon prep and I remember this from last year it's like you look forward to really two workouts a week I look forward my Wednesday morning tempo threshold workouts or track workouts

Saturday long runs and then deeper you get into prep you look forward to Saturday workouts at marathon pace and you see this fitness build you feel this fitness build when I was training for my ultra It was just going in, and we were previously talking about this,

it's just going out and just logging a lot of miles, which is, it's the name of the game for that beast, right? Absolutely. It's essential. But there's something about the marathon, and I've never done a half marathon, but there's something about the marathon for me where the distance and the training required for that distance

at certain paces, it is, it's a game almost. Like you are programming this game, and it's so strategic, it is so intentional, that when you apply these principles, anything's possible. Right. You know, it's,

there's a lot of science that goes into it. There is a lot of good old fashion guts that go into it and knowing how to sort of combine the two with a lot of intentionality, I think is a lot of fun. And it's, you know, you're playing chess.

You're not playing checkers. You really know how to, meld everything together, but you have to do it very, very carefully, but it's so much fun to see it all come together. The physiology of it, the psychology of it, you look at the timing, you look at all of the pieces

that have to come together, and it's just a lot of fun to sort of just work toward it. I love it. What we talked about in this series because we're doing this series really big. And the goal of this series is to make sure that by the end of it, someone can watch the entire series and PR their next race. Absolutely.

So we created these five pillars and it's really easy to listen to what we're about to say about these five pillars and say, well, there's this and there's that. Yeah, of course. And we'll talk about that throughout the series. However, I think there's five pillars in my honest opinion that if you focus on these five things, you can do really well in your next race. number one easy runs and we're going to dive into all these easy runs is number one which you know about 80% of your running will be these easy easy runs number two lactate or

anaerobic threshold being our tempo work our track workouts our speed work number three nutrition number four recovery and number five strategic progress right and I'll say I was thinking about this is past weekend because we spent some time together at Run Lab in Austin, which was epic. I mean, we did movement patterns and running improvements in terms of form and metabolic testing. And after that day spent at Run Lab, I kept thinking, what is running? Running is efficiency. It is learning how to become more efficient in every single way. That's what I took away from that weekend.

Yes, absolutely. What have you seen over the years of coaching in terms of efficiency that have made the biggest improvements in your runners? Being efficient with our hard days and understanding that it has to be smart and hard, not just hard. you know there's two ways to cut a lawn one is to take a razor blade and go out there on your hands and knees and cut every little sprig of grass one at a time with a razor blade the other way is to go and take a lawnmower back forth back forth you have to ask yourself which one is going to make the lawn look smoother neater which one is going to take less time. Overall, which one is going to be easier work, right? The answer is the use of the lawnmower. We all agree that it would be a lot harder to cut the lawn with a razor blade.

Did that necessarily then make hard the best approach? Answer's no. I'm not saying that we're not going to run hard and you're not going to run with guts on certain days. But the point is, it's let's be smart about the way. we're doing the work and not just assume that all hard work is good work. That's the point here. Before we dive any deeper into that, I want to talk to you about why we started Bayer Performance Nutrition and how our products can help you improve your health and performance.

In 2012, while I was studying nutrition in college, I was tired of searching for supplements that would meet my standards of quality and effectiveness. So after months of ordering ingredients in bulk and making products for myself, I'd decided to scale the operation and work with manufacturing teams to offer these formulas to you. And since then, VPN has evolved and our product line has grown. We offer the most effective supplements that can help you improve your workouts, optimize your recovery, and supply essential superfood nutrients so you can operate at your full potential. Our products are tested for banned substances and certified by informed sport, so you have peace

of mind that they're not contaminated with harmful ingredients. Head over to BPNSups.com to take your health and performance to the next level. Kind of going into the first pillar, easy runs. Spend some time with Allison at Run Lab this past weekend. She's amazing. She was great. Yeah. And one of the kind of metaphors she talked about was that if you think of your easy aerobic basebuilding runs,

which are below max aerobic heart rate. rate. And we can talk about how to identify a max aerobic heart rate and what zone you should be running at, what paces, and what efforts. But if you think of your aerobic,

base building, easy runs as your foundation, they're essential. You can't do anything without a foundation. And these speed workouts, these are the houses you build on top of that foundation. A lot of people think that if you

want to run faster or harder, quote unquote, you just need to more speed in. You need to go right to the track and start doing some intervals and some repeats. And I think what we found, and I specifically have found, is that when you start logging more volume,

you start adding these slow runs in, you build this aerobic base, that is your engine. And what are we trying to do with an engine? We're trying to make it more efficient. That is like the first step for me at least is, okay, let's run slower, below our max aerobic cart rate, start increasing volume and start becoming a better, more efficient runner. Yes, I think that one of the things that's lost on so many people, and it was lost on me for years, is the importance of running easy and not diluting ourselves into believing that something faster than easy is actually easy.

I hit on this back in our last podcast where we are products of an American high school system, products of the American university system, where I think a lot of times the easy runs are too hard. We run too fast. And we have ourselves in a constant state of distress. Neurologically, I feel like that we walk around with way, way too much cortisol coursing through our bodies. And that makes us tired. That makes us lethargic. We have this work ethic in America that I think is absolutely to be celebrated.

We love hard work. We respect hard work. And if we don't, we should. But what happens is then we believe that progress is linear. And I think that you can say, after your experience, in building this company, BPN, that the progress has not always been linear, right? It doesn't go from the bottom left to the top right and a nice straight line straight up every day, right? Now, you're striving to get 1% better every day, but that 1% doesn't necessarily actually mean you're going to get 1% faster every day.

1% better in the distance running world can mean, did I get better at recovery? did I get better at nutrition? Did I get better at the mental aspects of this sport? But what we can't fall prey to is running our easy runs too fast, right? Because when we do that, we induce a massive amount of stress on a day-to-day basis that becomes cumulative. And then when it's time to run hard, our bodies are tired and that we do not maximize physiologically. the gains that we have the chance to make on our specific hard days

because our easy days have been something faster than easy and that's a real danger that I think the driven athlete falls prey to and I think that you've probably done some of that

in the past too and I think you hit on that as well in the last podcast I was horrible with it yeah I mean when I started training for my actually, I call it my first marathon. My first two marathons, it was, I'm going to go out there and I'm just going to complete them. It was slog fests.

It sucked. You slogged them. You didn't run? I was thinking about this the other day, actually, when I was training for those two marathons, one, I had no plan. I had no structure. Yeah. I just went out and ran however far I wanted to.

Right. But I wasn't even tracking mileage or pace. I didn't have a garment. I didn't have a smart. watch. I wore a G-shock watch from when I was in the Army. And I would just look at my time.

I would just go run. And I can never tell you how long I was running or how fast. But it was just to log some miles. I thought a marathon was supposed to be miserable at that point in my life. And then when I signed up for my first marathon where I actually wanted to run a certain time,

and I started adding some structuring, I realized it was more difficult than I imagined it would be. But what I was doing wrong was I was trying to run every single race or every single run, excuse me, at the pace that I was going to be performing at the marathon. That's actually logical, right? It's logical if you don't know.

And so it's not something where I sneer or laugh at it because it makes empiric sense. Like, hey, I need to be able to do in practice. every day what I plan on doing on race day. And so I think that this conversation is going to help sort of ease, I think the fears that people have where if they go out and they run super easy on an easy day that somehow they're taking a step back, had this conversation with a young man yesterday who runs over 100 miles a week.

But it was interesting when I found out that he's running most of his easy days at six minutes and 40, six minutes, 45 seconds a mile. But marathon pace is 625. And those two are way, way too close together, right? Because when you ran, you average 64, 64, 645 pace for your fastest marathon. Most of your easy days were at 8 minute pace or slower. 8.30? Right. So you're a minute and a half.

And when I started actually slowing down my runs, that's when I started getting fast. because I was actually able to perform at the speed workout days. And it's so incredibly counterintuitive. And I think it's really tough for us to wrap our minds around. And so what I spend a lot of time doing is just telling people, hey, if you're wondering if you're running easy enough, you should be able to speak in full paragraphs your entire run. Not just sentences.

Let's go with paragraphs, right? What does that look like? Typically what? 135 to 150. Heart rate. That range, 15 beats a minute. Most people between the ages of 10. 25 and 45. They're pretty safe there. We can get into all of the nuanced calculations. But if you're

in the 140s, you're probably okay. I think we can agree with that, right? I would agree. Even 130s is really good, right? But if you start sneaking up into the mid-150s, 160 range on a quote-unquote easy run, we probably need to either slow it down or call that run something else. It's something that we're going to call harder than easy. And would anybody ever agree, let's go do a harder than easy run, right? That's what 160 beats a minute is. That's what, you know, running and where you're kind of like,

I don't feel so good. You know, if you're there on an easy day, you're probably overrunning it. And you're actually going to reap the benefits of slowing it down a bit. Well, I'm naturally competitive with myself. And I think that's what was really hard for me. In the beginning, was, well, yesterday I ran.

my run at 755 pace. Today I'm not feeling as good, but I need to run better than my 755 pace, even though it's an easy run. And one way I kind of countered this was using a heart rate monitor. So I never trust what my watch says. Sure.

My watch will say I'm easy run some days and 180 beats per minute, right? But I started wearing a chest strap heart rate monitor. And for me, that was this checks and balance of, okay, today is actually going to be an easy run. I'm not allowing my heart rate to get above 147, 148 beats per minute. Perfect. So it held me accountable to what I was actually trying to achieve for that workout.

Yeah. I follow the Maffetone method, which put me below 150 beats per minute. If I was running below 150 beats per minute, I was below my max aerobic heart rate. Right. But I think sometimes people need to implement these systems or, checks and balances to hold themselves accountable because it's really easy to compete with yourself. Oh, man.

Yeah. You know, and then we fall back into the trap. We're trying to get progress to be linear. And it can really be deletrious to, you know, our efforts to get better. You know what? I tell people, too, I've been having this discussion about heart rate and heart rate monitors. Let him be your guide, not your governor, right? Let's not ever lose what makes us quintessentially human, our ability to feel, right?

Our ability to know what pain is versus not. And so we need to know what easy is, and you should be able to feel it. I asked the guy the other day, would you know the difference between hot cold? He says, yes, do you know the difference between up and down? Well, yes. So, you know, we need to be able to know the difference between hard and easy, right? Right. But the heart rate monitor can be a guide. That way we can check the data just to make sure that our perception of how hard we're running matches what the physiologic data is telling us.

Let it be your governor or let it be your guide, not your governor per se. In other words, don't be so married to the gadgetry and married to the heart rate monitor. Did she actually forget to just kind of go, now wait, how do I feel? right? And let's make sure that we are always in touch with ourselves. I'd be curious. You know, now we have so much data available to us. I mean, I see people wearing three wearables sometimes and constantly monitoring data, sleep, performance, recovery, everything. I think there's a threshold where there's too much data that you're trying to work with.

I'd be curious what data you had available to you when you first started running. None. The data we had available to us was how we felt. Perception. Right. It's fascinating to me because I've been telling some people recently, we're the same organism that we were in the very first Olympic Games in Athens, Greece, in 1896. We're the same organism. Human beings live longer now. Right? Because we discovered penicillin, right? But we're the same organism.

We were 100 years ago, 150 years ago. But our ability to be engaged with all of this technology has outstripped our quintessentially human built-in ability to value things like delayed gratification, patients. If you think about it, Insta is the prefix to a whole lot of things that we just love, like Instagram, instant messaging. I was telling some of the other day that we're too lazy to get out of our trucks going to the liquor store and buy whiskey in the state of Texas. There's drive-through liquor stores now, right? But we're still the same organism that we were 100 years ago. And so part of running easy also then also, sort of. of clicks that switch. It flips the switch. It hits the button that requires us to engage that

part of our brains, which is delayed gratification, understanding that this is not instant fitness. We are in a microwave dinner world, and I've been telling a lot of my athletes this, and we are trying to engage in a turkey baking sport. right? We don't want to have TV dinners or microwave dinners on Thanksgiving Day. We want the turkey that takes six, seven, eight hours in the oven, right? So we got to trade our fitness the same way. We cannot microwave fitness.

And part of that means slow it down on your easy days because we have to let the human aerobic system do what it does. And it's the same one, right, that our bodies had. even look at Roger Bannister. He's the first man to ever break four minutes in the mile. Most people have heard of Roger Bannister, right? Roger Bannister is now made fun of in some running circles because his training plan had so much hard, fast running in it

in so little volume and so little easy running. We now know that Roger Bannister, who was the first man ever to break four minutes in the mile, probably would have run 8, 10 seconds faster in the mile, right? Had he actually engaged in the processes and understood the science and building a human aerobic system that we actually now know 60, 70 years later? I believe it was John Walker from New Zealand was the first man to break 350 in the mile. He ran 349. I dare say Bannister probably could have done that too if he had done.

slowed down, did more high enderobic work, and less what we refer to as anaerobic work, which is sprinting. It's really interesting. And all of that has to do with our ability to breathe deep, slow it down, engage our brains in the quintessentially human trait of delayed gratification and playing the long game, which is something that we're just not very good at because we've kind of short-circuited it. in the last 20 years. iPhone 1 in 2007 is that line of demarcation where our patients was officially thrown out the window.

I think of instinct, talking about data, actually. I think a lot of people have lost the ability to make decisions based off of instinct or gut or feeling that is subjective because they're so trained to make decisions based off of just subjective or objective data. You are damn right. So if I think of my training on a regular week, I can tell when I'm ready or need a speed workout because I start to itch for it.

I get tired. And this is, I felt this during ultra prep so much. And this is why I was looking forward to the transition to a marathon prep. My body was just telling me, stop running so slow all the time. Just give me one speed workout a week. That's all we need. If you just give me one speed workout a week, I will be happy. And my, if you just listen to your body,

And a lot of people can't listen to their body. They don't understand what that feels like. It's awareness. When you are aware of your body, you know what it needs. And I can feel when I'm about to, you know, it's a Monday night, Tuesday morning. I know the next day is a speed workout. I'm itching for it. I want it.

And it's like this release. But if you just listen to that instinct that your body is telling you, you can learn a lot about yourself. And it's learned by doing. You know, it's really not unlike a lot of the other things that we do in life. we get better and better at the more we do it. And what I say, which is harping right back on the whole concept of delayed gratification and playing the long game is the more you do it, the more you feel it. And I think so many of my runners, many of whom at this point may be listening to or watching this podcast, they can relate that 10, 12 weeks into it, they chuckle at what

seemed difficult or hard or confusing 10, 12 weeks prior because once you get in it and you learn by doing suddenly that instinct, you can start feeling it a lot better. You can feel pace, right? And workouts get screwed up less often, right? Because they don't go out hot and burn out. Start learning by doing. And that instinct that you have, those feelings that you get, if you think about it, that was learning by doing for you that I don't think three years ago that you would be able to sort of regulate your own feelings and be able to interpret the body's data that it's giving you that you're able to just interpret without having to use gadgetry or wearables to tell you.

Absolutely. Yeah. Well, I mean, you mentioned something earlier before we start recording. and I think this moves into this next pillar of speed workouts, lactate, anaerobic threshold, and it's stop fucking up your workouts. Right, and it's interesting. We just spent 10, 15 minutes talking about slowing down.

Now we're going to start talking about speeding up, but speeding up appropriately, right? And so when we say speed, we think fast. And that actually is true. That's what we're talking about. But it's about being appropriately fast, right? It's about looking at the workout, understanding the workout as assigned, running the workout within the parameters of both the times assigned or within the parameters of the energy

system that you're being asked to use on that day. what we find is is that once again by learning by doing people get better and better about hitting these workouts and understanding what's an appropriate pace. Well, we're trying to run a marathon and a good marathon is, I mean, 330 marathon is a good marathon. That's 8 minute pace. 329's 8 minute pace. That's running, right? But you have to ask yourself, how helpful is it on a fart leg workout? If you're given 10 times a minute, 10 times two minutes on, two minutes off,

how helpful is it to run five minute pace, right? On those fast sections. And then you're begging for a mercy killing after two or three repeats. Your hands are on your knees. And you can't jog your recoveries. Because five minute pace isn't an energy system and it's not a pace that you're going to be ever using at any point during your marathon that's on your schedule 14, 15, 16 weeks from now. So like you said, let's stop effing up our workouts by making them actually harder on the front end than

they need to be and harder on the front end than they should be in order for you to actually get a desired physiological adaptation that is going to be beneficial for you long term relative to your goal on race day. So people lose control of these workouts. They're not, outset. They're not even, they're not even in control at the start. Right. And, um, we don't always need to have blood squirting out of the corners of our eyes to be able to get better. Right. There's a way to apply moderate aerobic stress on our bodies that then actually allow us to make significant gains in our lactose. threshold. We actually know that even max V-O-2 pace, which is the pace that we can run all out for 10 to 12

minutes, right? Which is nowhere near sprint pace, right? Even MVO2, we reach a plateau for many people after many, many years in that. But the lactate threshold, which is much slower than that, right, is something that actually can be improved with moderately applied aerobic stress over weeks, months, in years. And that's the system that you use almost exclusively in half marathon on marathon training. And that's what I've really started to learn recently. And that's why I'm so interested in anaerobic or lactate threshold. because if you think of VO2 max as this big system of your maximum amount of oxygen that you can utilize or you have,

that's how much oxygen you have to use. Lactate or anaerobic threshold is a percentage of that VO2 max. You can keep... Not 85%. Yep. And you can keep improving, though. Like I talked about this in the video we just filmed. You can take two runners, for example.

each runner has the same V-O-2 max. However, one of those runners consistently works on lactate threshold training, and they have a higher percentage of their V-O-2 max that they can utilize, so they are a faster, more efficient, better runner. This past weekend, we spent some time at Run Lab that we were talking about, which was insightful data to the metabolic testing, V-O-2 max, anaerobic threshold. we, I mean, the way it was set up is we did a few different iterations.

I iteration one was about 10 minute warm up. And each iteration after that, we got significantly faster on the treadmill. And we would test our blood after each iteration to test for the blood lactate levels. Right. And what we anticipated was as we got faster and ran longer, blood lactate would increase dramatically in the blood. and then while you would recover, you'd see how fast that blood lactate would be removed. And what we realized and learned was,

one, my V-O-2 max was 59, but my anaerobic threshold was set at about a 620 minute-per-mile pace, which puts us in a good spot for Buffalo in New York. Yeah. But with all the aerobic base building, all these slow runs that I've been doing for the past couple years, that has built this efficient engine, which you can't rush it. It just takes time.

You have to be patient with it. But it improves one, your lactate threshold, how much of that VO2 max you can actually utilize at an efficient pace for a prolonged period of time. But more importantly to me, how fast can your body clear that lactic acid? Yes, and your body was clearing the lactate really, really fast. Super insightful data.

Yeah, it was. And, you know, in looking at it, we, I guess that your LT pace was 620, and it turns out that that's exactly what it was, right? And the, at 4.19 meters a second, I think it was 4.19 meters a second, I think is what it came out to, right? And one of the things that we do is we train a lot at critical velocity. pace, which is an interesting pace that is actually between max V-O-2, which is an extremely fast pace to run for any extended period of time. And it's an extremely fast pace to run if you're doing large amounts of intervals.

And so, you know, critical velocity pace is referred to as the pace between. It's actually between lactate threshold pace, which for you is 620 pace. your your max VO2 pace is much faster than that probably down around 520, 530 pace, right? Your CV pace that I had calculated on my own was about 549, 550 a mile. And that, if people are wondering what you were doing earlier this week when you were running 550 pace for 8 times 1,000 meters, that's what you were doing was critical velocity training. So I went down and I figured what 94% of your MVO2 is based on all the testing that Allison did in the lab. And lo and behold, it came out to five minutes and 48 seconds a mile.

So I had your pace set at 550. That's essentially the same thing, right? And that's the reason why you train at that level. The question is why? Well, the physiologists have figured out that in order for us to improve your lactate threshold, right, we can train at a pace that's slightly faster than LT pace, but not down at MVO2 pace. Because once you are at 100% of MVO2 and you get to 101%, then you start running anaerobically pretty quickly when you're faster than a max VO2, right?

And so if we run at about 94% of MVO2, we find that. that you get the biggest bang for your aerobic buck, for lack of a better way of putting it, and spending a lot of time at those paces, and you can run 8, 10, 11,000 meters of work in practice, whether it be in 1,200, 1,800 meter intervals, at about one minute of recovery per thousand meters run, we have figured out that that is the best way

to build a massive aerobic engine, and you can do tons of that work, large parts of the year. That's one of the keystones. of our success, and that's what is actually going to slowly but surely help drive down your lactate threshold through what's referred to as fractional utilization of your MVO2. A lot of big words, but scientifically, it's just really, really good running. And you're going to spend in this marathon build, everybody's going to watch you spend an immense

amount of time running at about 94% of your max VO2 pace on your track repeat work, once every 14 days. I'd be curious if, you know, so many people are messing up these, these track workouts, these tempo runs by running too fast. Yes.

And too hard where they're just, after each interval, they're dead. What I used to mess up too, and I think a lot of people do as well, is they rest too long in between these intervals. Correct.

So I'd love to talk about the worst work-to-rest ratio and why that's so important. Right. So the basic rule of thumb on max V-O2 work is that there is a one-to-one work-to-rest ratio that has its place but in limited amounts. When we're looking at training for a marathon, you want to have a much higher work to rest ratio on your repeat work, right? So you were doing repeats the other day at 550 mile speed for 1,000 meters of work, which is a little over 6 tenths of a mile. and you were getting one minute. That's it, right? That's quick, too. It allows your body, you get right up to scientifically,

where you're starting to pool lactate in your blood, right? And you get right up to that point where it starts becoming a little bit, oh, at the end of the workout, maybe a little dicey as far as the way you feel, but then you rest. But just for one minute, and when you have an efficient aerobic system, you're able to clear that lactate just enough in that one minute to where we can get back on the starting line

and then stress it right up to that point where it gets maybe a little dicey and then boom, the repeats over in one minute, right? If you are running too fast on your intervals, you pool too much lactate in your blood, and then it requires a ton more recovery time for you to clear enough. lactate to then be able to get back to the starting line and then run another repeat at the same pace. Right? And so if we slow it down to a pace that's slower than MVO2, and I calculate all these things for all of my runners, nationwide and even worldwide, what we do is is we hit that sweet spot where we can clear

enough lactate in a short period of time to get back on the line. And then if you just keep doing that little bit of stress repeatedly over and over and over and over, what you do is is you improve your lactate threshold. And the long and the short of it is this. You can run farther and you can run faster. And the last time I checked, that's the only game in town when it comes to running foot races down the damn street. Right? What I found was cool what I wanted to share, and we're going to share this in a YouTube video in the series.

it's really convenient to have a place like Austin, Texas, where people, your athletes can come run with you on Wednesday mornings. Right. Where you're holding them accountable to those one minutes. Because one minute is quick. Oh, it sucks. It sucks. Yeah.

What we did this past week is because I couldn't work out with you. I set up the workout in my Garmin app prior to, syncing it to my watch. And I just press start. And then when I hit a thousand meters, it would stop. Right. And the countdown would begin for 60 seconds. And then five seconds out and go, do, do, do, do.

And then when I was able to go, I had to go again. Right. But I think it's really important to hold yourself accountable to those rest times because one minute is really easy to turn into two, three, four minutes to rest. Right. And that's dangerous. And you're not getting the work. You're not getting the work.

Your body's not going to get the physiologic adaptations. If you don't have the perfect work-to-rest ratio, understanding how fast the work needs to be done, right, and understanding the why. And as a coach, frankly, it's my job to figure that out. I know how to do it. And I can honestly tell you that right before my eyes, watching you get ready to run your last marathon,

you ran 256, I thought that the process that we collaboratively employed was transformative for you. It was. Absolutely transformative, okay? And here's what I'm trying to tell people. I have given this type of work, and it works for distance runners at distances from two miles, one mile, all the way up to the marathon. Because what this pace does is it builds out this massive aerobic system. Okay, what we do is when we're running, we're trying to figure out how to deliver as much oxygenated blood to working muscles and do it as long as possible before we basically go over the cliff.

And once you go over that cliff, you have a few minutes of good running left and then you're just, you're trashed, right? And so we have red blood cell and we have an oxygen molecule. We breathe in the oxygen. It attaches itself to a red blood cell and then it gets delivered to working muscles, right? and the thing about distance running is you can look at two guys and they look the same. It's different from bodybuilding because you can see the gains because you're in the weight room and you're getting bigger, you're getting more ripped, right? With distance runners, it's a little bit more nuanced than that because you can look at two guys and they had the same height, same body weight and everything.

But what you don't realize is one of them is delivering twice the amount of oxygenated blood to working muscles through consistently applied stress. It's scientifically formulated, and the pace is like what we've been talking about for the track work, and we can go into dilactate threshold training and the tempo running here in a second and sort of what we're doing on those days as well. But here's the point is you build this massive oxygen delivery system

by which we can deliver tons more oxygenated blood to working muscles by applying the appropriate stress on very, very intentional days, but then cooling the fire, so to speak, by then just slowing it down on those easy days that we discussed. So we're using the track for critical velocity. Critical velocity training. It would do some max VO2 training, right? When we're trying to sharpen up maybe at the very end,

it's not nearly as critical for the marathon distance, but it is still a system that needs to be trained but not as much. And that's typically you'll do a one-to-one work-to-rest ratio on days like that, right? But yeah, critical velocity training is really a cornerstone for what we do because the advantage of that, of course, is that not only you're training at a scientific system that maximizes your body's ability to get aerobic adaptations. But it's also really good because for you, 550 pace is 35 seconds a mile faster than what you're going to need to run

to run 248, 249 in a marathon. So neurologically, we're just dialing in paces that are much faster than what you're actually going to need to run on race day. So it's just really, really good in multiple aspects, right? So let's talk about tempo and threshold. You know, and then working with you last year during this prep and going to this year, what we would do is we'd have all of our speed workouts on Wednesdays. Yeah. One Wednesday would be on the track for critical velocity.

The week after would be at the east side loop. It's a two mile loop. Right. And we do our tempo and threshold work there, which was a little slower, not as fast as critical velocity. Right. The next week, we'd be back at the track. and then we'd be back at East Side Loop. Talk about the importance of and why we do these tempo workouts and an example of what a tempo workout might look like.

Right. So when we say tempo running, what we're talking about is lactate threshold training, right? And so for you, that would be it paces anywhere from 615 to 625 a mile. We can be really, really, really exacting with it. But we also need to understand that on some level it's a bit. bit of an imprecise science? What if there's a 1% uphill grade on the street? What if it is 85% humidity? What if there is a stiff headwind? So there's some leeway here on how we characterize lactate threshold training, even critical velocity training for that matter.

When we start looking at environmental factors and the fact that there's just some leeway here, I mean, as long as we're in the right zone, we're in the right, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, a sort of training area, so to speak, physiologically, we're going to get the gains, whether they happen to be so neurotically married to pace, that we create a sense of failure if a repeat or a mile is four seconds slower than what was written down on paper. But generally speaking, for you, we're looking at 615 to 625 pace will be lactate threshold training for you. Well, we know that that dumps lactate into your blood and that the more you train, at lactate threshold training and your body becomes efficient at clearing that lactate from your

blood, then the more efficient you're going to be running farther, running faster, right? That's the reason why if all we do is jog every day, we are not going to get the fitness benefits that actually drives our body to get what's referred to as aerobic adaptations, right, which then increases the body's ability to run faster or farther. So that's why we do lactate threshold training as well. They're much longer sessions, okay? For you, that might look like seven miles at six minutes and 20 seconds a mile. And then what I like to do is cross over and then maybe have you touch on a system

that's closer to critical velocity pace on the tail end of this workout where you can get a little bit more aerobic punch, right, without doing the whole workout at CV pace because that would defeat the purpose of the day. So it might be seven miles at 620 pace, and then we might roll down and run anywhere from four to six times a half-mile repeat, right, at maybe six-minute pace, six-ten pace, which is not quite down at CV pace, but it's significantly faster than lactate threshold pace, right?

So, you know, you might do a workout where you do, I don't know, four miles at 615 or 620 pace, four, four, five times a half mile at six flat pace. Then I might have you do a shorter two mile or three mile tempo run on the tail end after that where I might have you spin down to 615 pace. I love those workouts. Oh, yeah. And, you know, you just get so much benefit from him. But if you're in control and you're not redlining and you just,

just simply get the aerobic stress right up to that point where you've kind of like, okay, I think I've had enough for today. And then the workout stops, your body's going to get massive gains. I liken it to this. You're never going to go to the weight room and max every single day on bench, right? But if you do the proper amount of chest work to maybe three max days a week and you don't lift so hard where you can't lift your arms, you're going to get those gains as long as you're dialing in your nutrition,

eating the proper amounts of protein, et cetera. It's the same thing. You don't try to max every day. And even on an individual workout, you don't try to max on that day. You do something that's submaximal but still appropriately stressful. And over weeks and months, your body is the most efficient machine in the world. It's better than anything that we can build with nuts and bolts and steel. I promise.

Just apply appropriate stress. It just responds masterfully. It's the most unbelievable thing on the face of the planet, the human body. Well, coming from a strength background, I used to think that these systems, muscular for one and then aerobic system for the other, were completely independent in terms of programming. Absolutely not. Once you learn, it's the same principles.

is a percentage based off of either a max or a certain threshold. When I, you know, was training for my Iron Man, we were training at percentages based off of FTP. When we're running, we're running based off of percentages of our, our max, you know, max aerobic heart rate or anaerobic threshold. If you're in the gym, you're doing training sets and reps based off a percentage of your one are at max. Those same principles apply to all styles of training. And I think the problem with a lot of people running is that it's one or two things. It's either I'm running a slow, easy run,

or I'm going balls to the walls and burning out. You're either jogging or you're ripping ass. Right? And the problem is, is we need to be somewhere in between if we're going to get better. That's true. Right? That's true. We use the same muscles to run that we do. in the weight room to a degree, right? I mean, we have cabs, we have hamstrings, we have quadriceps, right? Okay, here's what we know. There's three kinds of muscle fibers, even though most people think there's two, right? Everybody's heard of slow twitch and fast twitch, right?

Generally that's true, but there's actually two kinds of fast twitch fibers. And when we're in the weight room or we're doing more explosive work or we're rebounding a basketball or a defensive end trying to fire off the line of scrimmage. We're using fast-twitch fibers, and we're going to use what's referred to as type 2B fibers, right? There's three kinds of fibers. You've got your type 1, you've got your type 2A, your type 2B. When we're training as distance runners, really what we're mostly focused on to actually make what we refer to as gains, right? is focused on those type 2A fibers, which are referred to as malleable fibers.

What we have figured out in labs scientifically is that those type 2A fibers are malleable in that they can either, if they're left alone or trained only explosively, will stay exclusively as a, quote, fast-witch fiber. But we know that if you train them in the ways that you and I have been talking about for the last half hour, those are actually malleable, malleable meaning changeable, meaning transformable, and we can transform them into something that's more akin to a high-end aerobic fiber that's best used for 5K, 10K, half marathon, and marathon running. They have the ability to increase what's referred to as mitochondrial density.

The more mitochondria, which is the little engines that we have that make cells go, then that means that we can get them to perform in the endurance space. So what we're trying to do is transform those type 2A fibers from something that's naturally just a hot burning, fast-firing, explosive fiber into something that can be used for sort of extensible faster endurance exercise. And that's what we're doing, working on those type 2A fibers. And the body is just truly amazing of what we can do and transform it into. It's incredible.

And if you stay in the right training zone and you're disciplined and you understand that it's not going to happen overnight, that it's going to take many, many, many fortnights to get there. The body is going to get there. There's a reason why, just this past week, I had a guy in 10 weeks go from 355 in the marathon to 312 on the marathon by simply dialing in scientifically. paces so that we could get the aerobic adaptations and um it works it works i mean we're all humans we're all basically the same flesh and blood wise i mean we can agree that there's you know

certain things that people are more adept at but everybody can get better at being distance runners well i think going into to pillar three and pillar three and pillar four are kind of interchangeable in a sense of pillar three being nutrition. Yes. Pillar four being recovery. I think it's safe to say that in terms of nutrition, there are two areas of emphasis that are important. One, to fuel your training, two, to recover from your training sessions.

I also think it's safe to say, and you've probably seen it yourself, that there are some athletes that are really good at training and are horrible at eating and recovering. How frequently do you see that? I see it a lot because a lot of athletes get so hyper-focused on the training that they don't view nutrition and recovery as something as important and they don't see the interplay with all of it. And, well, if I didn't run well, it must be because I don't train hard enough.

I need to train harder or run faster when it could be that you're just putting low-octane fuel into a Lamborghini engine. And you don't want to do that, right? You are one of the best athletes I have ever coached when it comes to nutrition and recovery. You came from a place where nutrition was so important. And you came from a place in the weight room where recovery was so important to be able to make gains that you internalized recovery and nutrition as a vital part of the process to get better. So growing an aerobic system and growing your ability to run fast to you was akin to

growing in the right room, which still required nutrition and recovery. And I would be interested from a coach standpoint when you got into the marathoning space, you started working with me, what your thought processes were and what your approach was in maintaining your nutrition and your recovery focus as we got into hard training. I think coming from a bodybuilding and powerlifting background, one, you have to be super disciplined in terms of nutrition, not just for performance, but if I wanted to get down to a certain body fat percentage,

I had to be extremely precise with what I was putting in my body and at what amounts to the gram and to the ounce. Right. So I was already mentally trained to be able to do that. And I fully understand the importance of controlling the controllables. There are certain things in life that you can't control. They're just out of control. But I always know, at least in the point I'm in right now in life,

that I can control my food. I can control my recovery techniques. For nutrition, a lot of people think that, We'll just eat quote unquote clean foods. Well, yeah, that's like great to be eating these whole natural nutrient dense food sources, but are you eating enough of it? And I've met a lot of endurance athletes because there is this battle in endurance of if you are lighter, and it's true, naturally if you are lighter, you will be faster.

But it's also this balance of finding how do you fuel enough to perform because you're, you're probably not going to get fat or gain a lot of weight through endurance training. Oh, you don't think? A lot of endurance athletes are underfed, right? So, like, there's a difference between, and I saw this quote recently, I forget what it said. It said Americans are, I think it was overfed, but undernourished. And a lot of people are eating a lot of low quality, not nutrient dense foods. clear example.

I think for at least running in a marathon prep, you have to go into these workouts, your critical velocity, your track workouts, your tempo workouts, thresholds, you have to go into them fueled. If you're going into them unfueled or fasted, you are failing yourself. Like why? My question is why?

Why are you not fueling before the workout and during the workout? And what I see is this, is there are many runners, and I think there are cultural pressures. I think there are competitive pressures. There is self-imposed sort of a type A approach where there's some sort of a sense of self-control

that leads some runners to believe that the lighter the chassis, the faster the truck. and that swallowing food somehow can make them slower. And so what we have is an underfueled athlete. What we know is this on a scientific level, is that when you are running at lactate threshold pace, which is the pace that many runners are at, right, during half marathons and marathons, maybe a little faster,

that once you get to a certain point, then the glycolytic process begins, right? And glycolysis, we know what glycogen is, right? That comes from fuel. That comes from food source. And that is what the body burns before it then actually goes into an anaerobic state. And the longer you can stay in that glycolytic process, where you're able to burn glycogen, right,

then you are going to be able to maintain your pace longer than everybody else. What does that mean? It means you have to eat. It means you have to start the endeavor in which you are participating, which is running properly fueled, right? And if you think that iceberg lettuce is a meal, you're going to have a problem 30, 40 minutes into that tempo run when the glycolicytic process starts and your body goes,

oh shit, there's nothing here to burn. And then all of a sudden somebody is running anaerobically and then they slow down, right? And I think we commonly refer to that as a bong. You see people balk all the time. And why do they bong, Nick? No fuel. No damn fuel. The thing is, too, it is not just fueling.

during the training session, you have to be proactive. It starts the day before. Oh, yes. And I've seen so many runners. I run with runners and I'm watching them bonk. And I look over and I said, did you fuel before this workout? Did you fuel last night? Did you consume food?

I had some chicken and veggies. Well, no. Like, you need to be prepared for this workout. Like the day before these big workouts, on Tuesdays before going into Wednesdays, I am staying on the top of nutrition in terms of hydration. water, electrolyte intake, carbohydrates, a lot of carbohydrates. And in the morning before we do these workouts on Wednesdays, you know, I wake up, the workout starts at 6.

I'm up at 4 because I have to travel downtown. I wake up, going to the kitchen, I make a English muffin with some honey, maybe some peanut butter, banana, and then I'm sipping on two scoops at G-U-N-Sport on the way down to downtown Austin and meet up with you guys. And how many grams of carbohydrate? So that's 40 grams of carbohydrates just in G1M sport and 700 milligrams of sodium. And then I'll have one or two water bottles for during that workout. Each one has another two scoops of G1M sport.

So another 40 grams of carbs, 700 milligrams of sodium. And if it's in the warmer months here in Austin, I will add an extra scoop of electrolytes, another 500 milligrams of sodium to each bottle. So I go into these workouts feeling strong, feeling prong. It carries me through. So that way I know that when I'm doing the work, I'm actually working on systems that can be improved. I'm not holding myself back from improper nutrition. Right.

And, you know, when I have an athlete tell me, well, I don't eat breakfast. I don't eat before a hard workout. I asked them, okay, well, when did you eat dinner? Well, 7 p.m. Okay. So the workout starts at 6.30, the hard part of the workout starts. starts at 6.30. So that's almost 12 hours later. So you just went half a day with zero calories. And then you were going to engage in hard aerobic exercise and you're going to ask your body

to try to perform at its height. And that's actually not physically possible. Why would we ever leave for a family vacation with no fuel in the car, right? I've said that a thousand and times. And so your approach is one that's premised in discipline, but also in recognition of your body's physiologic needs to actually perform. And it's just really, really key, you know. And the G1M sport is formulated well. It's good and you've got to use it, but you've got to eat too, right? And it's got to be a combination of all of these things that really let you. us perform really, really well when we're calling on our bodies to perform in a way that's much more difficult than just sitting in our car driving to work.

And it's like right after the workout's over. I'm thinking, okay, now it's time to refuel. What do I need to eat to facilitate the recovery process? And nutrition isn't just spent around the workout. This is a 24-7 thing. The hard part is, and I can speak from experience, I had an eating disorder when I was younger. it's really easy for athletes to be mentally over consumed by the thought of nutrition. And that was the type A component and the over obsession with trying to be almost in almost over control.

Yep. Fair? It's very fair. And it's tracking everything. It's eating just the bare minimum. And I can relate to the people that are going through this. I really can. And I see it all the time.

I still see it in people all the time where you're constantly thinking about that meal. You're thinking about the next one and what you're going to eat and having to be over-controlled and over-obsessed with it. But it has to become part of this thing where it's you're consciously thinking, okay, if I want to perform tomorrow, what do I need to put in my body today to be the best version of myself in the next couple days, weeks, months, and years. and it has to become it's an awareness thing. And on a rare, and only on the rarest,

rarest of occasions, does it mean eat less? Right. Pretty much never. And I think that there's a component to this, too, that's really, really vital because I coach so many women, right?

Is understanding the importance of the differences between feminine health and male health when it comes to the endurance space and physical exercise. One of the major things that I see is iron deficiency that is the precursor to anemia and making sure that we understand the importance of it.

We live in a culture where we have a lot of vegetarians and we have a lot of vegans. And it's a really, really healthy way to eat. and it's a really, really good lifestyle if the diets are managed properly. And I'm not going to get into all the ends and out of it, but the main thing that I want to address is iron and why it's so important. Without iron, the aerobic process cannot occur. Without iron, oxygen does not get delivered to your working muscles.

And so when people say, well, why are you tired when you are anemic or iron deficient, The short answer is it's because your body is performing anaerobically doing almost nothing, right? It's just starved of oxygen because the iron is required to bind an oxygen molecule to a red blood cell. And so that is how basically, without going into more of the scientific weeds than I need to, that's the way oxygen gets delivered to working muscles, right? And that is all we are trying to do as distance runners is build an oxygen delivery system. If you are iron deficient or anemic, you do not have the chance to even get oxygen you're breathing in, even if you were in oxygen-laden air at sea level, right?

It's not getting to your working muscles. And so it's really important for the young women because they get their cycle and the hemolytic process where you actually smash red blood cells on the bottoms of your feet. It's very mechanistic, right? And if there's an iron molecule that's bonded to that red blood cell, well, then that gets smashed too, right? And then if you live in warmer clients in your – climates in your sweating, you lose iron through sweat. And through sweat, through the hemolidic process, and through getting your cycle, women tend to get iron deficient more than men. We know this. And so monitor it.

Ladies, get a blood test done. They're pretty cheap. You can get your hemoglobin, your hermaticrit. And then the main thing is looking at the precursor to clinical anemia, which is iron deficiency anemia. Where we look at that by looking at your ferretin levels. ladies, you know, really anything under 30 is pretty bad. And you need to talk to your physician. This is not medical advice.

Talk to your physician. They would be able to guide you in the space of what a low ferretin means. It's an iron binding protein. Basically, it's almost like a leading economic indicator before we go into a recession. Low ferretin means that's trending toward anemia clinically and address it because it's really, really one of the biggest limiting factors for our young women who eat a lot of lettuce, tend to issue eating red meat, chicken that are pretty high in protein. And we also don't cook in skillets anymore like we used to, where our grandma and our mom used

to have to oil the skillets. We actually would leach iron from cast iron skillets, but now with the coatings that we put on the non-stick pans, we actually don't even get iron from our skillets and pans anymore. And we've got to be mindful of that. And it can befall them in too. We have to watch it and just make sure that our iron levels don't dip because that can really, really thwart your aerobic development and your ability to perform.

I think it is important to state that I do recommend people get blood of work before starting a big training block and at multiple points during that training block because the stress you're putting your body under, there's a lot of things that are going to change. Believe it or not, a lot changes. I always see it in my blood work when I'm going into a big block or big prep, especially as volume increases. And that's why I think it's so important. And this kind of moves into the next pillar of recovery.

You know, nutrition obviously is a massive part of recovery. And I'm almost going to put this in recovery as well, too, is strength training. Strength training, I believe, is essential for everyone. but specifically endurance athletes. Just did a podcast with Sal to Stephano for Mind Pump. And he talks about the revolution of resistance training. And what happens when you're just doing cardiovascular training, typically spent on like a treadmill or a stair master,

very low intensity, low impact is it is catabolic. and naturally what's going to happen over time is your metabolism is going to slow down through just doing cardiovascular training. And what do we see with strength training or resistance training is that it increases and improves the metabolism because you are building muscle and muscle requires more calories. It burns more calories. Strength training is great, not just for recovery, but for strength and performance and endurance athletes, one for healthy metabolism,

two, to mitigate risk of injury, right? And we see overuse injuries and endurance athletes all the time. If you can maintain strength in your glutes, your hips, your quads, hamstrings, calves, entire lower body, your core, you will mitigate risk of injury throughout a prep. And what I've seen is that is one of the biggest missing pieces, in endurance athletes programs.

I completely agree. You know, in the 1980s and 1990s, I don't think it was stressed at all with distance runners. I came up in that space. I matured as an athlete, even at the collegiate level, in a space where we didn't take it as seriously as we should. Sometimes we didn't do it at all. We now know that strength programming should be part of everybody's routine.

Now, there's different ways to do it. There are some basic parameters within which you need to operate to do your strength training, but it needs to be a component of what you do. Injury mitigation is really, really huge. When you're hurt, you're not in the game. When you're not in the game, you're not getting better. And I think we've come a long way in the last 20 years where we understand that, hey, good glute strength could then prevent you from having a anterior hip flexor problem, right?

Having good core strength and having good stabilizers in our upper body can help us prevent from having a biomechanical inefficiency that makes us offload too much of our weight onto our forefoot, which can then cause an Achilles tendon problem. When you don't really have a frank Achilles tendon injury, as much as you do a pain that's a symptom of being really, really weak through your core, so to speak, right? Those are just examples of, I think, what doing strength work can do to help keep you in the game. Yeah, I mean, recovery is just like nutrition in terms of it's one of those things, especially

in a big block, because if you're really going after it for this marathon, your mileage is going to get to 60, 70, 80 miles a week. I mean, we're going to get mileage up to 70, 75 miles. a week. I got a couple of guys running 100 miles a week. And that's when proper nutrition and recovery techniques are the most important. Because what it does is you're being proactive rather than reactive. What happens when everyone gets injured? They throw the kitchen sink at it. It's completely reactive. Why isn't this getting better? Well, you're trying to address a problem that's already there. Recovery techniques that are implemented from the beginning is a proactive

approach where you are reducing risk of that injury even starting from the beginning. Like some of my favorite things to do, I personally do love static stretching, even though we just talked to Dr. Bauer at Run Lab this past week. And, you know, dynamic stretching is superior over static stretching. And we found that out in the last 20 years. Yeah. And dynamic should be your priority. I personally love myofascial release in terms of foam roller.

using lacrosse balls to break up tissue that's tight, going to get sports massages, deep tissue massages. You know, especially like we talked about this this past weekend. A lot of runners, myself included, will occasionally get knee issues. What happens when you get a knee issue? You think that that is the point of the issue. So you try to address the knee.

And what you find is, well, maybe the knee issue is because of a tight, hip flexor. And maybe your tight hip flexor is because of a weak glute. That's right. So you're trying to identify, you know, these issues of what's going on and why it's happening. But if we can get ahead of the injuries

with some of these myofasher release, dynamic stretching, strength training, I love using the sauna, compression boots, like the Norma Tech compression boots. I'll use toe spacers at night to kind of just relieve

some of the bones of the feet. There's a lot of these things that we can do and implement into our routine and it shouldn't take up your entire life. Right, but there's things you can do in the morning, your free time. If you're watching TV, throw some compression boots on, do some stretches. Correct.

Add the toe spacers. Get enough sleep. I mean, sleep, it's a number one tool for recovery. Just add these things into your prep from the beginning to reduce risk of something happening. Right. And, you know, you know, you can get as specific as hiring a, you know, a strength coach or working with a

strength coach who works almost exclusively in the, in the distance running space and can address specific, not just, not just strength, but also mobility exercises that are absolutely vital to addressing the classic weaknesses and distance runners. I work closely with a coach right now who is working with a ton of my athletes right now. And she just does a fantastic job. I mean, Mallory does a great job. But have a strength program, have a recovery routine, have something that has been at least vetted or peer-reviewed by somebody who's in the know enough to be able to say, okay, this is better than nothing. And I think that's the key is, listen, just do something that's better than nothing.

It doesn't have to be just so exacting and just absolutely perfect and just rapturous, you know, where you got, you know, rainbows blowing out of your ass every day. Just get something that's solid, something that's good, something that works for you and fits into your life. And like you said, it might be a routine that you can run through and do some circuits three days a week and it takes 20 minutes. Listen, if you spend 60 minutes a week on strength, Better than zero, right? Yeah, you're right. There you go. I mean, what happens with running is if you have anything that is inefficient or hurt or injured,

endurance sports is that one thing that is going to expose it 100 times. Well, let's tell the real life story about what we discover with Kim Davis and Dr. Bauer. We weren't super, super concerned about it, but you were having a little time. bit of discomfort just outside of your kneecap and we were kind of exploring the why on that and of course you had just come across a 100, you know, mile race that you decided to do, you know, if you had been running 15 miles a week, I don't think that even if you were in exactly the same strength space and had the same issues that that knee would have ever started hurting. But you ran a hundred mile race and it exposed. something that we sort of discovered and we kind of had an aha moment there when we were in the lab together just last weekend, right?

Mm-hmm. And what was it? It was a tight TFL, which is very interesting to me because any time someone assumes that they have a tight hip or hip flexor, they think it's a soaz muscle. The so-as muscle is a very

buzzy word right now, right? And I thought it was my so-as muscle. as Dr. Bauer's kind of working me over, he's like, oh, it's your TFL. I never heard of my TFL, you know, before, and I didn't know what it was. They didn't show us the chart on the wall. They did, yeah. And it's kind of like right outside of that hip bone. But it goes down to the knee kind of alongside the IT band.

And it was kind of tugging on my knee, which was causing the knee issues. Which just goes back to say is, just because you have a concern in one part, doesn't mean that's where the issue is stemming from, but we would have never have identified that tight TFL if I wanted to have spent 19 hours and 13 minutes running on it. No, no, it would have never discovered it. And then, you know, it was causing some tugging. So then it tugged on the IT band. The IT band attaches, goes down the side of your leg, attaches outside of the knee.

And it was symptomatic at the knee. You didn't have a knee injury at all. You did not have a knee injury. Your IT band was so tight. It was causing pain because the TFL was tugging on it. up at your hip and then we later started looking at this and says hey you would come off of a little some of the strength training stuff that you had done to try to freshen your legs up in the four weeks prior to rocky raccoon and so then even though everything is in the realm of

strong with you there was a slight imbalance between your anterior which is your front and your posterior which is your back in your glute and the in the in the solution actually is just let's get back doing stuff that activates your glutes. It's going to offload your TFL. It's going to stop pulling out of T-Band. This thing is going to make your knee stop hurting. So at the end of the day, basically, it was your butt that was slightly out of balance, strength-wise, with your front that caused a little pain on the outside of your kneecap.

Who to thunk it? At a weak ass. Yeah. Yeah. Nobody's ever called you a weak-ass before. No, but currently my glutes are a little weaker than apparently they should be. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the cool thing is, is what you realize is having a global strength routine

to kind of try to keep everything in balance and stay strong. It's all about injury prevention as much as anything else. The thing is at the end of day, it's going to happen. Like some injuries you can't avoid. I'd be curious how many athletes of yours currently, like percentage-wise, have some sort of small nagging injury. Some but not very many. It's impressive.

Because most of them have some sort of a strength routine and because I'm really, really careful with the way I craft the workouts where I am conscious of three things that we have to watch in our training, which is training volume, training intensity, and training density. and I control those things meticulously.

I wring my hands over a half mile here, a half mile there when I am structuring the workouts, probably neurotically. But that's my job is to be neurotic, to coach my ass off, to make sure that I keep everybody in the game in injury free. And then when you add in most people who have some sort of strength program, those are the things that keep us out of trouble. staying strong monitoring your volume, your density, and your intensity. We can go into what those three things mean. And when you monitor those things carefully and you know what you're doing, you can really, really keep an athlete in the game, which then means they have a chance to get better.

I mean, when I heard you talk about volume, intensity, and density a few weeks ago, that really clicked for me. and I explained that actually in this past video we filmed, where if I think about, you know, this past track workout we just did, there is a specified volume for that workout. There's a total amount of mileage or meters we were going to cover. There was a certain intensity or pace for each one that I was going to cover. And then density, there was a certain amount of rest

that I was going to have in between each interval. That can be applied to a specific training session or an entire training block. Right. So what I find that befalls many runners is that they get into this obsession with having an overly dense training program, meaning they run too many hard workouts too close together. It is a product of the United States scholastic and university systems where we're married to this two workout a week program that really is just a lot.

incredibly arbitrary. Why do we have to be doing too hard workouts a week? It's a function of the fact that we have two four-year timeframes that we are really obsessed with in this country for some very utilitarian reasons. We're in high school for four years. We have four years to go and get that vaunted college scholarship. We have four years in the university system to meet all of our goals as collegiate athletes. And so what we do is, is we proceed with this immense amount urgency that makes us train in ways that are physiologically bankrupt and that are not necessarily the most productive when it comes to keeping us in the game and actually helping us improve. And so what happens is when we reduce training density.

In other words, it's not as dense the amount of hard running we do. We spread it out. And what I've found for a lot of people who are working people who are not pixies laying around on massage tables and sitting in cryogenic chambers and all this other stuff, I find that one workout a week is really, really good because then we have time to recover in between them. So reducing training density can help prevent injury because we're not ripping and tearing at our fascia and our connective tissue and doing the things to tend to get us hurt, right? Training volume. Well, we're all pretty familiar with what that means, which is how much are you doing?

and we do it on the micro scale and we also do it on the macro scale when we go into the analysis. How much are you running in a week or in a month? How many miles a week you run? We hear that a lot, right? But then it's the volume within the workout, right? It has to be appropriate enough for you to meet the physiologic demands of the race you're trying to run. But it also can't be too much because then you, you run the risk of basically overcooking that turkey, right?

So we got to be smart. So control your volume so you don't get injured. Control your density so that you don't get injured. Control your intensity so that, one, you don't shut down your aerobic pathways where you basically eviscerate any chance you have of getting aerobic adaptations, but also controlling the intensity means you're not just ripping and tearing. at your muscle fibers, right? And flooding your legs with lactate,

it takes two days, three days, to get out of your system where you're limping around on sore legs. Control your intensity, make it appropriate. Control your density, make it appropriate. Control your volume. Make it appropriate. You're going to progress.

Probably not going to get hurt. I think my new thing I'm going to say during this marathon prep, you said it earlier. I was going to refer to my, My fast runs is ripping ass. You should ripin ass? You know what?

If people don't get anything else out of this podcast, they got to get ripping ass, man. I'm going to have A-Rod design a shirt. It's just all about ripping ass. Well, you know, we love hammerheads. And I was joking around with a couple of my athletes the other day. And I says, you know, it is with great fear that I'm pairing you two ladies together. on this workout because you are both hammerheads and they're pretty self-deprecating about it.

They have trouble with the intensity part, but that's what you get with type A athletes. I mean, we're talking about, you know, women who are 240-something marathoners and trying to control the intensity. And I always tell people sometimes as your coach, I'm as much your brake pedal as I am your gas pedal because a lot of people think coach is just their. to motivate. Or a lot of times we're actually there to try to de-escalate. We're there trying to hold on to the reins.

And I swear to goodness, some of these athletes are like riding a buck and bronco with a rodeo. I mean, I literally feel like sometimes after these practices, I need a neck brace. Because, man, when you get driven people who are out there and they are getting after it, you just got to say, hey, okay, calm it down, calm it down, calm it down, calm it down. You know, smoke coming off your shoes there. That's my issue or was my issue last year when I started running these track workouts. And Josh did a really good job.

And your brake pedal. Yeah, he was pulling my reins really well. Yeah. And because you remember the track workouts, I would go out first. And I would try to lead that group in the front. And it's just, it is the type A. It's get out front and hold it. Well, think about it.

That's what your career right now in everything that you're doing. you're out front, you're leading. Yeah. Right? It's go, go, go, go, go. It's be the best. And that's a good thing. I would rather try to coach aggressiveness.

And I would rather coach the hammerhead out of somebody than try to coach toughness and aggressiveness into somebody. Right? I'd much rather it be that way. Let's go into the last pillar. Last pillar is strategic progress. And I think this is really important. It's something that a lot of people don't understand as well.

We had a conversation about this. It was probably a few weeks ago, actually. We sat down to start planning out the marathon series. And it can be very intimidating to look at, say, a 12, 14, 16, 20-week marathon or training build and prep and add strategy to it. A lot of the times people are just throwing darts at that dart board and those darts or workouts and you're just throwing them at the structure of the build with no intention.

But a strategic progress of a build and a prep has to be fully intentional to achieve a desired result. Right. One of the things that we know is that if we are meticulous, and that we're calculating in this business, we then are wrestling control of the control of bulls, which then helps us have more of a sort of predictive outcome, right? And so by looking at the things like,

what is the data say your lactate threshold is? look at what traditionally has worked from a volume, a density, and an intensity standpoint. Look at whether or not it's getting warmer throughout your training cycle versus cooler. In other words, are we going from fall into winter or are we going from winter into the spring and the summer? We have to be intentional about what races we run, where we're running them. what the courses look like, what the weather patterns are in that part of the country that time of year, whether or not we're having a baby soon, right? Yeah.

How many week-long vacations do we have scheduled where we're going to be out there drinking every bottle of cheap tequila in Mexico that might not be the most conducive activity to running, right? Hey, there's nothing wrong with a nice week-long vacation in Mexico, but it's pretty inconvenient if it's one week before your goal marathon, right? It's all about strategic planning and looking at where we're running it, while we're running it, when we're running it, what are we doing in our lives? Are we an accountant? Is it going to be in the middle of tax season? And we're going to be on two hours of sleep and 37 cups of coffee a day. Those are all parts of the analysis that I go into in looking at the strategic planning that goes into running a big race. Because this ain't like running the mile where you can go out and run one all-out mile that attract me probably every weekend for many weeks on end. At most, you're running maybe three marathons in a year.

Most people, too. You don't want to go and do a 20-week investment and just screw it up because you forgot to tell, you know, your coach that you were going to go climbing up and down, you know, a, mountains in Machupeach, you know, for 14 days before the marathon. These are the things we got to think about, right? And it's also important to mention that you have to be honest with yourself going into a marathon prep. So say your previous marathon PR was four hours and 30 minutes and someone comes to you and says, hey, Jeff, I want to run a sub three-hour marathon next.

and it's being honest with yourself of endurance and building into endurance has to be strategic, it has to be intentional, there has to be patience, it is a long-term play. Right. But to say you want to go from a 430 to a sub-3 within a matter of weeks or months, it's kind of ignorant, right? Right. And I had this conversation today with a young lady who just ran 321 at the Austin marathon. And I think you can vouch for the fact that that is a fine race on that course.

That's a tough course. Right. And she's going to run the big sur marathon here coming up in about eight weeks, right, which is another really tough course. And I said, listen, you know, we've got eight weeks. You're going to spend a, you know, one and a half here recovering and we're going to be able to get in some good running. So we're not going to chase three hours just yet, but strategically planning. And we spent about 45 minutes on the phone today, planning it out, we think we can go get five or six minutes at Big Sur. We're going to be able to go get in the 314, 315 range and then strategically plan into a nice race somewhere probably in the upper Midwest on a flat course in the late autumn.

And then we're going to just kick the crap out of that marathon and she's going to haul ass, man. And she's probably going to sniff three hours, if not break three hours then. But it's about planning. It's about being realistic. Be audacious. but be audacious right up to that line before it gets unrealistic, and that's where I like to coach you.

Let's be audacious. Let's dream big, but let's be strategic in our planning so that we can go and have an amazing day. Let's accomplish our goals, but let's be super methodical in our strategic planning in all things. So like right now, we're looking at running the Buffalo Marathon, right? I know that you ran the best race of your life in temperatures that were too warm to run a marathon, too windy to run a marathon, too humid to run a marathon. I'm not concerned about you running a marathon on May 29th in upstate New York, where it could be a little humid, could be a little on the warm-ish side for a marathon, because you've proved you can do it.

So part of strategic planning was I'm not throwing him into something that I know he's not physically capable of. that is so vitally important as a coach is to set your athletes up for success in the micro, individually in a workout, and in the macro in planning long term for a race. I really like that takeaway. It's be audacious, but don't be unrealistic. Yes, audacious up to the line of unrealistic. That's where I want the goals to be. That's powerful. Because if you aren't trying to be audacious, you're going to wake up in 10 years and you're going to wonder if I coach so many talented people

I coach so many people who have dreams and I tell them that what's life without dreams what's life without goals let's be audacious let me analyze your physiology let me analyze the way you live your life let me analyze the way you are able to accomplish things let's pick a goal that is maybe even unrealistic to the point where you don't even want to advertise it. But right at that point where it's like, we're going to do this damn thing. We're going to do this damn thing. An unrealistic doesn't mean unrealistic forever.

It might only mean unrealistic right now. Absolutely. Listen, I coach a young woman. I ain't going to name her name. She was a 316 marathon at this time last year. Now she's 248 marathoner. Well, the U.S. Olympic Committee has set the qualifying time for the U.S. Olympic trials marathon at 2024-237.

That's $5.59 a mile. We're going to do this damn thing because you ought to see some of the workouts. She's been running. Okay? And I got a whole lot like that. And if you think you can't run a four-hour marathon because you're stuck at five hours, you're going to rate four hours in the marathon. If you don't think you can break three hours in the marathon because you're stuck at 3.30, let's go figure it out. It's probably not nearly as unrealistic as you think.

You know what? I don't even want to say think. I think fear. I don't think it's as unrealistic as you fear. Let's take fear out of it. And let's take audacious hope and desire and drive. and let's put that in place. Just got chip away.

Just chip away. Yeah, go good a chisel. Do you have to have a good hammer. Just a decent hammer. We'll be all right. Well, Jeff, for two weeks into marathon prep, it's going well so far, but I'm ready for this sub-2-50.

Well, we're about to hit some big miles here in the next couple of weeks and some big workouts. So we're going to be ready. And once again, it's about strategic planning. This is based on fact. This is based on data. This is based on past experience, and it's audacious, but it's empirically doable. All right.

Well, that is the five pillars of marathon prep that we'll be focusing on for this build. Jeff, as always, been a pleasure. Always fun. See you next one. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Bear Performance Podcast. Please leave a rating and review on the platform you are listening to if you enjoyed it. It helps us to grow and reach more people. with the intent of changing lives

through the Go One More mindset. If you are ready to take your health and performance to the next level, head over at BPNSups.com to take the first step. We offer a wide range of effective supplements to help you perform at your highest level, built on quality, and proven by results without compromise.